Harry Turtledove - Bombs Away

“But…But…But…” Ihor unstuck himself. He got to his feet, stepped away from the table-and from his wife-and pulled up his trouser leg to show his scars. “One of your people was here not too long ago. He looked at the leg, and he said the wound was too bad for the Army to take me back.”

“Well, I’m here now, and I’m telling you something fucking else,” the MGB man said. “Get over here with What’s-his-face if you know what’s good for you. You want to get cute, we’ll teach you more about cute than you ever wanted to find out.”

They would, too. And they’d enjoy themselves while they were doing it. Nobody here would lift a finger to save him. If the collective farm rebelled, the Chekists would take a couple of T-34s out of storage-maybe not even the new ones, but the originals with the two-man turret and the smaller gun-and level the place to the ground. They’d shoot the men right away. They’d have their fun with the women, then shoot them, too. All the kolkhozniks knew as much. Ihor could see the sick certainty in their eyes. He was sure they could also see it in his.

He limped over to the Chekists. “Cut the playacting, cuntface,” the one with the red tie said. “Won’t do you no good.”

“It isn’t playacting. It’s how I walk. But…” Ihor drew himself to stiff attention. It wasn’t as if he’d forgotten how. “I serve the Soviet Union!” As well as I can, he added, but only to himself.

“Let’s go,” Red Tie said. Go they did. Ihor looked back over his shoulder once, but only once. Seeing Anya wailing like that made him feel worse, not better.

He and Bohdan got into the Gaz’s back seat. Vanya slammed the door closed behind them. That was when Ihor discovered the rear doors had no latches on the inside. He also discovered that a grill of steel mesh separated the passengers in the back seat from the ones up front.

Vanya drove. Tovarishch Red Tie-Ihor still didn’t know his name-sat on the passenger side and took it easy. “We drop off these dingleberries, then head out to the next worthless fucking dump,” he said.

“That’s about the size of it,” Vanya agreed. “Shitty goddamn job, but somebody’s gotta do it.”

“Hey, we serve the Soviet Union, too,” the other Chekist said. “How are we gonna whip the imperialists without soldiers, huh? Gotta find ’em somewhere. These cunts ain’t much, but they’re better’n nothin’.”

They drove down to Vasilkov, south of Kiev. It had been a small, sleepy town. Now it was bustling: it had taken over many of the functions Kiev had performed till it was visited by hell on earth. The place put Ihor in mind of a four-year-old in a two-year-old’s clothes-it was too big for its britches.

The Gaz stopped in front of a Red Army recruiting station. “We’ll take you inside,” Red Tie told Ihor and Bohdan. “Don’t want anything getting fucked up, the way it could if we just leave you on the sidewalk.” Don’t want you bugging out -Ihor had no trouble reading between the lines.

A sergeant with a patch where his left eye should have been and scars all over that side of his face waved to the MGB men as if they were old friends. They probably were. “Well, what kind of ravens’ meat have you got for me this time?” he called.

“Ravens’ meat? These are veterans! Good, solid men.” Red Tie sounded insulted.

“They’re veterans, are they?” The sergeant’s glower put the Chekist’s to shame, but he had unfair advantages in frightfulness. “You pussies fought the Hitlerites?”

“Yes, Comrade Sergeant,” Ihor and Bohdan said together.

“Then we don’t even have to waste time with the oath. You swore it the last time, and it still holds.” The cyclops sergeant jabbed a thumb at a doorway behind him. “Go through there. They’ll do your paperwork and kit you out. This time tomorrow, you’ll be on a train heading west. Something to look forward to, hey?”

Ihor looked forward only to going home to Anya. All he wanted to do was stay alive. Now if only the state cared a kopek for what he wanted!

When Aaron Finch came to the door, Ruth opened it with the oddest expression on her face. After he kissed her, he asked, “Okay, what’s Leon gone and done?” That was the likeliest thing he could think of to make her wear such a bemused look.

“Leon didn’t do anything,” Ruth said. As if to contradict her, Aaron got attacked by a toddling tornado in a cowboy outfit. Leon hadn’t seen him all day. When you’d just turned two, that was a decent chunk of your lifespan.

Once the tickling and rough-housing and other greetings were out of the way, Aaron asked, “ Nu? What is going on then?” He was positive something had to be.

By way of reply, his wife took an envelope out of a cut-glass bowl on a little table near the door and handed it to him. “This is for you,” she said.

“Oh,” he said: a little breath of a word. His was not the sort of household that got a letter from the White House, a letter whose envelope was embossed with the Presidential seal, every day. He eyed it in mock alarm. “They must be drafting me.”

Ruth poked him in the ribs. He wriggled to make her happy, even though he wasn’t ticklish. “Open it, you-you bulvan, you,” she said.

“Bulvan!” Leon said happily. He collected new words the way FDR had collected stamps. He had no idea that one was Yiddish, not English. He didn’t know the difference, or care. He didn’t know it meant ox or jerk. He just liked the sound of it.

Open it Aaron did: carefully, so he could keep the envelope for a souvenir along with whatever it held. The stationery had the Presidential emblem at the top of the sheet, too.

“Read!” Ruth said, as if she were Leon demanding a story.

Aaron read: “ ‘Dear Mr. Finch: It is with great pleasure that I congratulate you for the brave action you took in capturing the Soviet aviator who had bailed out of his bomber after attacking Los Angeles. What you did showed courage, quick wits, and patriotism. Americans can and should take you for an example. Your country owes you a debt of gratitude.’ ”

It wasn’t one of those printed letters made to look as if they were typewritten, with a machine signature likewise impersonating the real McCoy. He could feel the way the typewriter’s strokes indented the paper in the back. The President’s signature, sloppy and smeary, was also the genuine article. The typed-by/author line at the bottom left read rc/HST.

Ruth stared at the letter. “Wow!” she said. “That’s something! Well, so are you.” She kissed him.

He wagged a finger at her. “Don’t tell Roxane about it. She’ll think I’m selling out the workers again.”

“She’s not that bad,” Ruth said.

“Like heck she’s not,” Aaron replied. “But if you hadn’t gone to Marvin’s with her that one afternoon, we never would’ve run into each other. I’ll cut her some slack on account of that.”

“I guess we wouldn’t,” Ruth said. “I hadn’t thought of it that way.”

“There ought to be stories where some little thing happens differently and everything that comes afterwards gets changed from the way it really was,” Aaron said thoughtfully. “They might be fun, make you think a little while you’re reading. You know, like if the South won the Civil War.”

“Or if the Nazis won World War II.” Ruth showed she got what he was talking about.

He shook his head anyway. “Nobody’s ever gonna want to read about that, not in a million years. What else could a story like that be about except them killing everybody they didn’t like-everybody who wasn’t German, I mean?”

His father and mother had come to America from a little Romanian town. After the war, his older brother up in Oregon (who had lived through the bomb that fell on Portland) had got a couple of letters from a relative on their mother’s side. He’d sent money once. Then the Iron Curtain thudded down, and letters stopped getting through.